A Better Light
by BigBangYingYang62
Summary: Year after year, those stories go by, along with a few games here and there. Everything painting him as the bad guy. I never thought about which team he was batting for all that much. Until he saved me.


I do not own the Slenderman mythos or The Rake Creepypasta. So now, I would ask that you please read this rather... Unorthodox Slenderman story instead of dilly-dallying any futher. Damn you, Mother, for getting me into old fashioned sayings.

* * *

Why I'm telling you nothing more than a whim, I cannot say.

I guess you could call it a good gut feeling, but either way, I just feel like every other story people would paint out of my words will be twisted and that it has to come out of my own mouth.

I just wanted to have a camping trip with my uncle and three cousins, and that is exactly what I got.

Uncle Gabriel was the life of any party or family outing, and this trip was no exception. Telling us interesting and hilarious stories about what camping was like when he was a kid, and making us laugh during every second of it, whether or not the jokes he broke out were good or bad.

I cried when he was the first to go.

Melissa was the cousin that made me wish she and I weren't related, because I am willing to admit that she was H-O-T, drop dead gorgeous, sexy, whatever you wanna call it. She was the sweetest thing, but definitely didn't have a problem without breaking out her pocket knife.

I know it makes me a bad person, but if only one other person out of all of us could have survived, I almost wanna say it should have been her.

Now Abby was something special, and not for the same reasons as her sister. She was born with autism, but she wrote stories that were almost on par with what my uncle told us, and had gotten a letter from a publishing company in her mailbox two weeks later.

But she never got to read it, so I guess I'll be going there with the story to explain what happened myself.

And finally, the instrument of death and destruction, Michael. He and I were an unstoppable team, let me tell you. No matter what happened, be it detention or my aunt yelling at us or even just pissing off the neighbors, he and I got in trouble together and laughed about it all the time.

He was more of a brother to me than a cousin... Which is why it upsets me that I couldn't use "instrument of death and destruction" in a positive light this time...

* * *

It was the second day of our camping trip and all was normal for us. Uncle Gabe was sleeping so he could have more energy for telling us stories tonight, I was sitting on the river bank with a fishing pole, and Melissa was chatting with Abby about Abby's latest work and how it was gonna be the next Harry Potter series.

But Mike... He was kind of having a panic attack at the moment and trying to calm himself down. He had left his schizophrenia pills back at the house in the rush and wouldn't be able to take them again until we got home in another three days. Uncle Gabe and I tried our best to calm him down that afternoon by reminding him that he was usually good about controlling himself, especially with something like Uncle Gabe's stories, so we all just sort of laughed it off and moved on.

* * *

But, to be perfectly blunt, the following night, after the fire died and we all turned in, shit hit the fan at full speed, and I don't know how none of us heard any noise from it. I just remember Mike waking me up, shaking me by the shoulders with tears streaming down his face, whispering over and over "Dad's dead, Dad's dead, Dad's dead..."

I was still very sleepy and quite irritated from being woken up like that, so instead of thinking about it rationally, I couldn't help but assume that it was his schizophrenia acting up again and making him hallucinate. But before I could give him the usual talk about how he wasn't seeing something real, I heard a scream ring out that belonged to Abby. Seemingly forgetting his own fears, Mike and I looked at each other and ran to the source of the scream, and that's when the floodgates opened.

Uncle Gabe was just outside his tent, laying dead in a pool of his own blood and organs. His throat was slit open, making it look like he choked to death on his own blood, so maybe that's why we didn't hear anything. His stomach was cut open as well, leaving his intestines tied around his wrists and stomach acid mixing into the blood.

Inside the stomach cavity was a pocket knife that I knew all too well, and with all rationality thrown out the window, I shouted at the barely waking up Melissa. Mike handed me some rope, and Abby and I tied her to a tree while she was still barefoot and in her tank top and sweat pants. She was screaming, so despite her blushing and accusing me of rape, I ripped away the part of her tank top that covered her stomach and fashioned it into a gag.

I couldn't even fall asleep that night. I was too busy crying about Uncle Gabe. How was I gonna explain to Dad that his larger than life little brother was gone when I got home? And how could I live life without that sense of humor in the summer?

* * *

The next day, Abby and I were in a rather rainy mood today, which the overhead clouds reflecting that mood, and after last night, I don't think either of us could really blame each other. Though I knew it must be hitting Abby and Mike harder considering they lost a father. Melissa, I wasn't all that sure about in both the positive or the negative if we're being honest.

She was the only one could have killed Uncle Gabe, considering she shared a tent with heavy sleeper Abby and knew how to not make noise in the woods. But whenever I asked her why, she always maintained that she didn't kill him and then went into a detailed explanation about her and her boyfriend Jimmy in a dream she was having that I don't wanna repeat.

But... There was ONE interesting thing she said. Something that I didn't understand at the time, though looking back on it, it should have been obvious from the moment she suggested it.

She said that her knife was in purse, and that her purse was in the car. And, as if reading my mind, right when I was about to question her as to what that was supposed to mean to me, she pointed out that the only one with access to the car keys were Uncle Gabe and Mike.

At the time, all I did was look away from her and look at Mike, who was all curled up in a heap on some roots beneath a tree, thinking long and hard about Melissa's words. I doubted them the more I looked at Mike, which was probably the stupidest mistake of my life. I knew Mike. I had been closer to him than I had EVER been with the other two, and knew him better than I knew myself! He would NEVER kill his own father!

Then Melissa asked if I knew what kind of medication Mike took, I stared at her, completely dumbfounded, and in a fit of frustration, I yelled at her for trying to use Mike's schizophrenia as an excuse to say he killed Uncle Gabe, when she said something that shut me right up.

Mike had Multiple Personality Disorder. Not schizophrenia like Uncle Gabe and I were told.

It all made sense now.

In that single moment, it all made sense.

I just wish I could have acted upon it before the eavesdropping Mike did.

* * *

All afternoon and night and even into the fourth morning, I had been running, but what else could I do?

Uncle Gabe was dissected, Melissa was bleeding out if she wasn't dead already, and Abby... I'm sorry, I get sick just thinking about what was done to HER.

Mike, or whoever was driving his body at this point, was chasing me with the intent to kill etched into his face, and knew that he was going to succeed there.

I was never better then Mike when it came to getting physical. I was always the clutched that tripped over himself while Mike was in peak physical condition. That point was made clear when I tripped over a rock and hit the ground in a clearing. Although I was too scared to give it much note at the time, on a tree, I noticed a piece of paper. It had a rather curious symbol on it that... Well... It looked almost like a letter "O" with a big "X" through it.

But I couldn't really focus on it at the time as Mike finally caught up to me, the hair covering one eye showing off that this was definitely a darker and eviler persona than the Mike I knew. I saw him raise Melissa's knife, knowing I had nowhere to run. I braced myself for the end...

But it never came.

I looked up and saw Mike staring right past me at something. He looked hypnotized, transfixed by something. Though others would have dreaded seeing what I saw, I didn't know what to think.

He was tall, at least 8-10 feet in height. He was well dressed, wearing a solid black business suit with a red tie, but those weren't his main features that caught my eye.

His skin was pale gray, though I guess it could have passed off as white with the shade it was. And his face... Well... There was none. Not even signs of facial features or hair.

Before I could take in anything else that might have been there, I heard a very loud and inhuman cry; so loud that I thought my ear drums were gonna split cleanly in two.

I looked back at Mike just in time to see the source of the cry, and though I don't look at it that way NOW, at the time, I regarded what I saw with pure terror.

A small, pale gray creature, with orifices for eyes and long, almost metallic looking claws that must have been three feet each, a head almost like a watermelon. It was so alien-like, and considering that was my immediate reaction, I look back on it and figure I need help more than Mike and Abby ever did.

Speaking of Mike, guess who didn't make it out alive? And I'm not just saying that because his evil personality was in control. That little... THING... The Living Rake, I call it... It jumped on top of him like a wild animal. And, in a way that reminded me of Freddy Krueger, he began using those claws to rip Mike's body apart.

I looked up at the faceless... Slenderman... Once more, and his faceless face was the last I saw before passing out.

* * *

By the time I finally came to, I was in a hospital room and it had been a total of five days since the incident in the woods. The doctors said when they saw me, they couldn't explain what happened to me.

I had been put down on the side of the road by a man that didn't even stick around to explain anything. They wouldn't describe him clearly enough to make any sense, but I knew who they were talking about.

They found my campsite about two days before I woke up, and they found what was left of everyone as well, though as far as Mike goes, he was mauled pretty bad and they only know it was him because of dental records.

After losing her whole family like that, my aunt has become reclusive and shut in, even from us. But I know she'll be telling herself that Uncle Gabe wouldn't want her to be like this forever and she'd back into dating soon enough.

Against my mother's words, I went back to those same woods yesterday and worked my way to the clearing where it all happened. Much to my disappointment, I didn't see the Slenderman or Living Rake there that day, but I plan on going back tomorrow as well. And hopefully, I'll get a response to the little note I left there.

"Thank you."

* * *

My first Slender story actually INVOLVING Slender, so it might be sloppy. Please let me know your thoughts in the reviews, and if you wanna see more Slender stories in the future, let me know. See ya around, folks.


End file.
